In his first ten days in office, the President of the United States has shown us that the lessons of history do not apply to him. Swiftly and proudly, he has signed a string of Executive Orders, the most recent barring citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering America for at least 90 days. He’s not done yet. The order – signed on International Holocaust Remembrance Day – also calls for a review of more countries to be added to the ban; a suspension of America’s refugee program; a ban of all Syrian refugees; and, a call for new immigration screening procedures. “Extreme vetting,” he barks.

My preoccupation with this is personal, taking me back home, to Northern Ireland in the 1980s, a time when it was not uncommon for me to hand over my driver’s license for inspection by a member of the British Army or an RUC officer at seemingly random road closures and checkpoints.

I recall a snowy afternoon at the top of the Ligoniel Road in Belfast. A student teacher, not yet twenty-one and heading home for Christmas, I was moving out of the Halls of Residence at Stranmillis College. My little Datsun weighed down with library books and lecture notes, clothes and toiletries, boxes of vinyl records and cassette tapes, a collection of concert posters wrapped in rubber bands, my prized hi-fi, and a violin, I somehow looked less like a university student and more, perhaps, like an IRA terrorist. Even though I had my license and could answer politely and truthfully, the young soldiers’ questions about where I had been and where I was going – “extreme vetting” – still I had to step aside in the slush and the snow. Cold and annoyed, I watched and waited as they rifled through the contents of my car, looking under the seats and in the trunk, emptying out my make-up bag, disturbing the folders of college papers. All in the name of security I know, but to this day I question the randomness of it. I remember raging inside – seething – that I was being subjected to such treatment in my own country. My. Own. Country. I said nothing. Not a word. Soon, they sent me on my way, but I will never forgot it or the way it made me wonder about what it was about me on that particular day that would cause British soldiers with guns to interrogate me and order me out of my vehicle and search its contents? Did I fit some profile? Did I look like a terrorist? What was the ‘reasonable suspicion?” Who was I?

In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1995, poet Seamus Heaney shares a heart-stopping moment from the history of our anguished and wounded Northern Ireland. In this story, lies a powerful lesson about humanity – one that would serve well the President of these United States and anyone who aspires to the ideals of America and to the future we desire for our children and ourselves:

“One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, “Any Catholics among you, step out here”. As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don’t move, we’ll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA . . . The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.”

I recall a college assignment from years ago, requiring us to draw comparisons between South Africa and Northern Ireland. Trying to confront the political impasse and to overcome the sectarianism that had defined us for too long, I suppose it made sense to learn from South Africa’s shameful past. But I never thought I would be compelled to revisit the topic as an immigrant in America in 2017. Never. The new President of the United States of America has taken me back to times I thought were behind us forever.

Times such as those when an apartheid government condoned the “banning of people.” Between 1948 and 1991, such a government severely restricted the movement of black South Africans and their political activities. The apartheid government’s mantra was simple:

Ban them.

Keep silent their opposition to apartheid.

Harass them at the slightest provocation.

They took it one step further by banning political opponents and using indefinite detention, imprisonment, torture, and political assassination. I could digress here and go back to the enactment of Internment Law in my Northern Ireland, but that is another sad chapter for another day. And finally, in South Africa, banning led to banishment, removing people from their homes and families, stripping them of their citizenship, and deporting them to remote areas of the country, the ill-named “homelands,” often without basic living necessities and always indefinitely.

For me, Donald Trump’s promises are eerily reminiscent of early apartheid laws in South Africa, particularly the “pass laws” that were put in place to segregate the population and to severely restrict the movement of South African blacks. It required all African males over the age of 16 to carry a “reference book” (formerly a ‘passbook’), documentation of personal information and employment history. Following its enactment, many Africans were then compelled to violate the pass laws in order to find work to support their families. This led to harassment, fines, and arrests. More bloodshed. It also led to resistence, because invariably, people will rise up against such abominations. In South Africa, there was the early Defiance Campaign, the massive women’s protest in Pretoria (1956), and then the 1960 massacre of 69 protestors at a ‘pass burning’ at the police station in Sharpeville.

There was Nelson Mandela.

Mandela mattered – and he does today more than ever – because he represented what could be. Like Martin Luther King‘s dream of what America could be and like the peace Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan once envisioned for Northern Ireland, Mandela’s vision of South Africa as a democratic rainbow-nation inspired the first all-race democratic election, moving more than 17 million black South Africans to vote for the first time. Such a sight to behold, even on a television screen on the other side of the world – a reminder that anything can happen, that Seamus Heaney‘s hope and history can rhyme.

As young university students in 1984, we sang along with The Specials urging those who could to “Free Nelson Mandela.” How could we not? His release was a moral imperative, the right thing to do against a racist regime. We were young and full of hope for a better future, and through that lens, we saw Margaret Thatcher and others in her party as resolute in their support of white rule which seemed only to prolong Mandela’s imprisonment in that tiny cell. Thatcher had even deemed Mandela a terrorist, speaking for most of her party. I remember well, when the Iron Lady took office, her strident refusal to enforce sanctions on apartheid while much of the world was doing so. Her policy of “constructive engagement” with the country’s white minority government polarized her such that when she died, there were reports of only a few tears shed in South Africa.

But when Mandela walked out of jail, a joyous crack was heard all over the world. While enormous challenges lay ahead with more blood spilled, eventually, apartheid would be taken down. De Klerk and Mandela, together, would rise up to be honored with the Nobel Prize for Peace for their shared vision of a South Africa without apartheid, a democratic nation, an example for other countries beleaguered by bigotry and bitterness, proof positive that it is possible to sustain humanity in a world defined by brutal divisiveness. It is possible to sustain humanity without a ban on immigrants or a Muslim registry.

The President’s Executive Order needs to sit on a shelf along with the pass laws of Apartheid, the Internment Act Law in Northern Ireland, and that book of laws in Nazi Germany prior to World War II that required Jews to carry papers and citizens to prove they weren’t Jewish. It is an assault on the ideals of America and reminds me of something Archbishop Tutu said about Arizona’s anti immigrant law, SB1070. Tutu raised the specter of apartheid, where black Africans could be jailed for being in their own country without their papers, degraded and deemed less worthy because of the color of their skin, and he cautioned us:

Abominations such as Apartheid do not start with an entire population suddenly becoming inhumane. They start here… They start with stripping people of rights and dignity – such as the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Not because it is right, but because you can.

Had I not been awake early this morning, I would have missed the goings-on on Cyprus Avenue. It is Van Morrison’s 70th birthday, and it crosses my mind again that his music – like Seamus Heaney’s poetry – has scored much of my life. For the crowd gathered up on Cyprus Avenue to celebrate his birthday with him, a sense of wonder; for me, a homesickness Stephen King aptly describes as “a terribly keen blade.”

Social media and BBC Radio Ulster are doing their best to assuage the lump-in-my-throat melancholy – while at the same time making it worse – reminding me of the thousands of miles that stretch between us.

I am not there.

I am not there, with my college friend Ruth, to sing along and wonder if he might indulge us with a rendition of Cyprus Avenue which everyone surely wants to hear – for old times sake and because it is fitting. But you never know where you are with Van; you just remember where you are from.

Eight hours behind and a lifetime away from where the second concert of the day is now underway, I relate easily to those fans who have traveled from other continents to sit now among the eighty five trees lining Cyprus Avenue and absorb Van’s Belfast, if only for an hour or two. Clicking on the link to the BBC Radio Ulster broadcast, I was transported instantly to my bedroom in my parent’s house on the Dublin Road, a teenager again and tuning in to Radio Luxembourg – in the Days Before Rock and Roll.

Justin . . .

I am down on my knees
At those wireless knobs
Telefunken, Telefunken
And I’m searching for
Luxembourg, Luxembourg,
Athlone, Budapest, AFN,
Hilversum, Helvetia
In the days before rock ‘n’ roll

Specific and evocative, the names of streets in Van Morrison’s songs – Hyndford Street, Cyprus Avenue, Fitzroy – as much as the characters that people them and the rituals that shaped those lives – Madame George, the window cleaners taking a break for tea with Paris Buns from the shop, you taking the train from Dublin up to Sandy Row, kids collecting bottle-tops, all of us tuning into Radio Luxembourg on our transistor radios, going to the pictures, or the chipper, and filling ourselves with pastie suppers, gravy rings, Wagon Wheels, barmbrack, Snowballs – all these with a Sense of Wonder that has a universal resonance.

And all the time going to Coney Island I’m thinking,
Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?

Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?

Maybe I understand the pull that brings fans from other continents to Cyprus Avenue today. I am reminded of the time I drove from Tucson to Tucumcari and Tehachapi to Tonopah – places Lowell George immortalized in Willin’. While they turned out not to tourist destinations, nor did I see Dallas Alice in every headlight, I could hear Billy Payne’s grace notes on the piano and Lowell George growling about her every mile I covered. Too, I remember visiting San Francisco drawn less by St. Dominic’s Preview and more by the sight of orange boxes scattered against a SafeWay supermarket in the rain. Can you hear the echo of Patrick Kavanagh in Van Morrison’s songs, finding God in ‘the bits and pieces of everyday.”

As a new mother, almost eighteen years ago, far away from my Northern Ireland home and in Arizona, it was “Brown Eyed Girl” that I sang to my green-eyed girl to help her fall asleep. When she did her first little dance as a toddler, a jaunty “Bright Side of the Road” kept her going. As she twirled and clapped her hands, I reminisced about a wee dander down Sunnyside Street, heading out with my friends on a Saturday night, and this song, so jaunty that it was used as the promotional jingle for a “Belfast’s got the buzz” campaign while our wee country tried to pick itself up from all that had ravaged it.

When I got over getting cancer and when I turned a corner in the world of widowhood, it was to my favorite Van Morrison song that I turned and turn. “When the Healing has Begun,” is a tour de force from “Into the Music,” the first Van record I bought from Ronnie Miller’s Pop-In record store in Antrim. A far more satisfying thing than the school lunch I was supposed to buy – it fed my soul. I played it until I knew the lyrics by heart. And there they stayed until about twenty years later when I found a pristine copy, a German import, still in its protective plastic, at Tracks on Wax then a treasure trove for lovers of vinyl in Phoenix, Arizona – before vinyl became cool and collectible for a new generation.

I had worn out that song, which required some effort. In the days before record players like mine had to compete with tape decks, CD players, and MP3 files, if I wanted to hear a song just one more time or just the opening breath of it, there was no simple replay button, no nonchalant click; rather, the knack of placing the stylus right in the groove, in “the sweet spot,” where it would pick up the familiar repetitive rhythm, the violins, a “yeah” from Van, and “we’ll walk down the avenue again.”

Cyprus. Fitzroy. Belfast. Phoenix. it matters not. We are anywhere and everywhere, underneath the stars. Neither here nor there. It enchants me still – and maybe even Van himself – this song that takes him from a roar through a mumble to a barely there whisper at the end. And when the familiar refrain streamed across a continent into my kitchen in the desert with appreciative whistles from the Belfast crowd, my whole world stopped for a second. Hypnotized momentarily. Such is the “aesthetic force” of that song for me.

Back street jelly roll . . .

I remember the first time I saw him perform it, at the Ulster Hall in Belfast. Leaning forward from the good seats in the balcony – having scored tickets from a friendly roadie in the Crown Bar – it felt a bit like being in church, somehow knowing we should behave and be quiet, reverent even, if he was going to take us along with him on this song. And he did.

And the healing begins . . .

And we’ll walk down the avenue in style
And we’ll walk down the avenue and we will smile
And we’ll say baby ain’t it all worthwhile
When the healing has begun

When I turned fifty (admittedly a while ago), I realized that: a) I would never make enough money to go to a job I hate every day and b) money really isn’t everything although I have often acted as though it is. Much to the chagrin of Suze Orman, I don’t organize money neatly in my wallet, and I honestly couldn’t tell you how much is in the checking account at any given time. If I must choose between purchasing something sensible like a new kitchen appliance or springing for a hard-bound signed copy of Seamus Heaney’s Nobel speech, “Crediting Poetry,” well, there is no choice which leads me to an August afternoon in 2013, two weeks before Heaney died.

Time and space collapsed when I spotted the handsome little volume perched on a shelf in an air-conditioned fine out-of-print books store in Arizona, about as far away as I could be from Anahorish, “where springs washed into the shiny grass.” Alas, I didn’t buy the signed first US edition that afternoon, and I felt so guilty for having abandoned it there, that I knew it would only be a matter of time before I would go back, with an explanation to the avuncular Phoenician bookseller, of the finer points of buying ‘on tick.’

Previously, the best money I ever spent was in 1982. Flush with my university grant money, I bought three things that would change my life – a Eurail pass, a 35mm camera, and a hi-fi stereo system. I moved out of the Halls of Residence at Stranmillis College and into a red-brick terraced house on Ridgeway Street, where I lived with four male engineering students who tolerated my girliness and threw great parties without ever damaging any of my vinyl.

At the lower end of our street was The Lyric Theater and at the top, The Belfast Wine Company, a convenient and well-stocked off-license.

Ridgeway Street, Belfast, N. Ireland

In the middle, houses teemed with students, all imaginative misfits like me, most of us going to our classes only when there was nothing else to do. What sparkles in my memory is the time spent on Ridgeway Street and one glorious evening when we spilled out of our houses and onto the road, pelting each other with water balloons while the frontman of Thin Lizzy, a very cool Phil Lynott, leaned against the door jamb of a house full of art students from Derry. I have no idea what he was doing there, but he was enjoying himself. Maybe he got lost on the way to wherever he was supposed to be staying after a gig at The Kings Hall. In my mind’s eye he is as plain as day, smoking and laughing at us as we soaked each other, on the kind of shimmering summer night that transforms Northern Ireland into a veritable tourist destination.Decades later and all the vinyl records bought with my lunch money and my university grant, are stowed away in the roof-space of my parent’s house in Castledawson. Faded and stashed between the pages of an old diary, the Eurail pass took me to places that have stayed in my heart to this day – Paris, Florence, Rome, Capri, the Greek islands. The Olympus camera? It was stolen from my first apartment in Phoenix.

It took thirty years and a breast cancer diagnosis before I would buy another 35mm camera, when I was ready finally to take stock and see things through different lenses. In the Fall of 2012, a friend and I enrolled in a college photography class that required us to pay attention to shapes and patterns and all the lines and curves we might otherwise miss going about my daily business. The photography teacher’s assignments sent me on scavenger hunts every Sunday to spots like the “Water Mark,” where five 14-foot aluminum horses that guard a road in Scottsdale. Some folks believe it should be designated a wonder of the world, but my teacher just wanted me to notice it, to pay attention to those splendid horses that evoke the Wild West but also prevent flooding during our Monsoon season. At such times, water gushes from the horse’s mouths, and it is an awesome sight.

Now I know those wild horses belong in the Arizona desert where the rains are rare, but I prefer to think of them along the Annadale Embankment, watching over us at the end of a wild Belfast night.

Footnote: The Heaney Lecture is now where it belongs – between Door into the Dark and Stepping Stones . . . on my bookcase. As for Phil? As Joseph O’Connor explains, he was “the first Irish person ever to bound onto a stadium stage in leather trousers and bawl to the gods: “Are you OUT there?” He was our first rock star, gone too soon, and on a rainy night in Phoenix, some three decades later, I can still hear his coyote call . . .

But there is the replenishing joy of the songs themselves, that carnival of outlaws, renegades and chancers, tumbling through the sunbursts of his rhymes. From the lonesome cowboy’s prairie to the louche streets of Soho, from the mythic Celtic battlefields over to Dino’s bar and grill, his restless creativity roamed. You could stock a damn good jukebox with only his work, so vivid the eye for detail and so capacious its reach . . . The songs will abide. That’s the only consolation. But it’s a real one. Even in the darkest night, you can always hear the king’s call.

I often feel guilty for having left my Northern Ireland. I often wonder if perhaps the better thing or the best thing would have been to stay, to stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our television screen at six o’clock every night. But I didn’t stay. I fled. I became an immigrant in an America I no longer recognize, and turned my back on the vulnerable, tiny country that shaped and scared me – my lovely tragic Northern Ireland.

Not much older than my 18 year old American daughter, I spent most of the 1980s planning my escape. It was a turbulent and traumatic time in Northern Ireland. We lived and worked and played and prayed within a national crucible of doubt and suspicion, a half-empty glass. I suppose I always anticipated the worst; as such, I was rarely disappointed.

In such a small place, it makes sense that so many of us would know somebody directly affected by The Troubles. According to the Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN) from 1969 – 1999, “3,568 people died. There were over 35,000 shootings, 150,000 bombings, and over 40,000 people wounded. Surveys say half of the population knows somebody killed or injured.” And, what did I do? Nothing. I left.

Weary of the bombings and killings; weary of the hatred and the sense of hopelessness that seeped into our ordinary lives, I came to America. Ardent and young, I believed the likes of Tom Wolfe who said that

America is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.

But this quiet Sunday morning, following a week of murder in these United States – the fatal shootings of two more African American men, Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota, and a sniper attack on 12 police officers at a peaceful protest in Dallas by a military veteran who had served in Afghanistan and who authorities say “wanted to kill white people” – I don’t recognize this picture of America. I find myself catapulted back to our living room in the housing estate on the Dublin Road. I am watching the news and wondering what will happen next and if it could possibly be worse than the last time. I am 18 years old again. The Republican Hunger Strikes in the Maze prison are coming to a head, and ordinary people are afraid. What will happen next?

What of America? What will happen next? From where I sit this morning, it is a place where murder happens all the time, where innocent black men are slaughtered all the time, where schools or colleges or churches or movie theaters or grocery store parking lots or peaceful protests become killing fields, where hate – and complacency about it – appears to be winning – all the time.

This is not the America of my dreams, nor is it the America President Obama aspires to:

There is sorrow, there is anger, there is confusion about next steps. But there’s unity in recognizing that this is not how we want our communities to operate. This is not who we want to be as Americans.

No. It is not who we want to be. Or is it? Our cultural and policy decisions have made guns far more accessible in America than anywhere else on the planet. If we want something different, we must do something different. So what are we going to do?

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Immigration matters

From there to here . . .

Yvonne hails from Antrim, Northern Ireland, and has lived in the desert southwest of the United States for almost thirty years. Married, with a daughter who is navigating her path through the "teen tunnel," and a haughty cat, Atticus, she has spent the better part of the last three decades in the classroom as a student, teacher, and administrator. Her mid-life crisis came as a sneaky Stage II invasive breast cancer diagnosis which subsequently sent her to the blogosphere where she found a virtual home away from home . . .